news, information, and ideas to keep you alive and kickin’

Termites Hold Key to Biofuel?

As unlikely as it sounds, termites might provide a partial solution to our energy needs. Lisa Margonelli reports in The Atlantic:

But where humans have failed, the termite succeeds—spectacularly. A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency. The little biorefineries inside each termite allow the insects to eat up $11 billion in U.S. property every year. But some scientists and policy makers believe they may also make the termite a sort of biotech Rumpelstiltskin, able to spin straw—or grass, or wood by-products—into something much more valuable. Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.

Advertisements

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

One Response

This is yet another miracle of nature for which man may never be able to deconstruct and utilize in mass before reaching a point of diminishing returns. The question with all of these research attempts is, “When will we or will we ever recouperate the costs involved in the research and develepment stages.” And by “We” I mean the American taxpayer who funds the bulk of these projects either through grants (adding to National Debt) or Bank Loans (Money out of thin air). Not to mention that all of these advancements will eventually be sold to corporations for pennies on the dollar. Still further these corporations will charge consumers a premium for said fuels.

In the end, who pays? The taxpayers. Who profits? Not the taxpayer.

Look, we may be able to identify the complex chemicals involved in the digestive process’ of a termite. Then another industry must use energy and resources to mass produce these chemicals. More money and resources would be required to design a facility to mass produce these gases and “biofuels”. Then more still to transport and distribute them.

In the end will we, the taxpayer, ever get our money back converting one form of energy from one fuel to another to another?

My conclusion always comes back to one simple concept. Every form of energy starts with the Sun. Why continually waste energy converting it from one form to another? Take hydrogen. It’s conversion trail is from solar, to plants, to coal, to pollution, to electricity, to hydrogen and then back to electricity or combustion to move a car. Bio-Fuels convert from Sun, to crops (water, fuel and food), to conversion to liquids (energy and chemicals), to transport, to combustion (pollution) to move a car.

In the end there are only a few processes that we can harness right now with little energy, little pollution and the least amount of conversion. Solar, Wind and Water. K.I.S.S. Wind and Solar, to electricity, to locomotion.

We don’t need every vehicle to run off of electricity. Let’s just convert passenger vehicles to clean battery/capacitor plug-ins. Homeowners by a portion of clean electricity from the their utilities to offset pollution.

Let’s upgrade our National Electrical Grid to bring clean power from all across the country. Let’s turn every household’s rooftop into a decentralized contributor to the electric grid. (My favorites: Thin Film Solar Laminate metal roofing, could be cheap and easy to install. CIGS or printable ink solar films)

We don’t need more research. We need subsidies to start stamping out the technologies we already have. Let’s talk.